The Las Palmas sherries have their origin
in the recent launch of Tio Pepe En Rama, which as a brilliant idea
that Martin Skelton had. He wanted to capture the freshness and
personality of a Fino taken straight from the barrel, without
filtration or clarification. The traditional view is that these En
Rama sherries don’t travel. ‘To send en rama outside Jerez raw is
utter madness,’ recalls Skelton. ‘Everyone is saying that Gonzalez
Byass is crazy. I was so proud to be able to show people wild Tio
Pepe!’

En Rama was originally meant to be a
one-off, for the UK market. But it has taken off, and just kept
growing. Now lots of other bodegas are offering En Rama. The next
step was to release another level of En Rama sherries, the Las
Palmas.

The term ‘palma’ refers to the way
cellarmasters classify the casks in their cellars. A palma is a
particularly delicate, clean, pure fino or great quality. As this
palma ages, it can then become dos palmas, tres palmas or cuatro
palmas. But this is an internal, arbitary classification, particular
to each cellar master. The palma is marked on the cask with a
slightly sloping line with the number of the palma indicated by
branches coming from the top (one for una, two for dos and so on).

Where does fino end and amontillado
begin? Amontillado can be made in one of two ways. The first, and
probably best, is to allow the flor on the top of a fino to fade,
and when it gets thin enough the wine begins to age oxidatively. It
is then fortified to 17.5% alcohol at which point the flor will
disappear altogether. The other is to simply fortify the fino to
this alcohol level, killing the flor and kicking in the oxidative
ageing process. Using the first method, there’s no strict
distinction between fino and amontillado, as the biological and
oxidative ageing processes overlap. The older finos are thus
sometimes known as fino-amontillado.

Gonzalez Byass has around 600 barrels of
very fine, older finos, and it’s from these that the En Rama and Las
Palmas sherries are selected. Tio Pepe is usually 4.5 years old at
bottling. My job was to select four barrels of 6 year old fino (Una
Palma), three barrels of 8 years old (Dos Palmas), one barrel of 10
year old fino-amontillado plus a reserve (Tres Palmas), and one
barrel for Cuatro (from one of four very old barrels of amontillado,
around 50 years of age). Fortunately we didn’t have to try all 600
barrels: Antonio had done a pre-selection.

A 60 year old amontillado

It was a full morning’s work, though,
going through sampling barrels with a vanencia (the long sticks with
a thin cup on the end), and deciding whether or not the barrel was
going to make the cut. We even tried a few barrels that weren’t on
the long list, and came up with a short list. Samples were taken
from each of the selected barrels, and we ended up sitting round a
table in the tasting room with 10 samples of each of the Una, Dos
and Tres Palmas, and the four samples of Cuatro Palmas. After an hour
or so of discussion, the job was complete.